People are not Resources

Every week someone joins and someone leaves. Keeping a stable team is a challenge. At last night’s Sydney Agile meetup we got talking about People management.

“We need to catchup and talk about Resourcing.” -Management

Whenever someone leaves an organisation HR steps in. They do their best to recover confidence. Invariably, the conversation about ‘Resourcing’ comes up. This is where we can start to improved things.

Agile and Resources

Have you noticed? Readify, Google CBA and Atlassian have made a shift. They don’t have a ‘Human Resources’ dept. Instead that have ‘Talent managers’ and ‘People consultants’. Yes, I know – that does sound ‘cheesy & fake’ but at least it’s a start!

In our group last night it was interesting to see how making this small shift away from ‘resources’ can have a significant pay off in terms of management strategy, training, customer engagement, project recovery, and most importantly, trust.

This change is a organisational change that everyone needs support. Coaching. Guidance. This is not obvious if you’ve cut your teeth on old management.

Invest in people.

“If you look at our innovative practices you might think, ‘It’s just software engineering’. But we’ve created this culture that permeates to all the other departments as well. Maybe if I was in another organisation these ideas would have remained in my head. But within this environment where thinking differently is a given, it’s allowed me to be more of a freethinker.” -Joris Luijke, Atlassian.